deeper question that he asks in ver. 23, "Are they ministers of
Christ?" and he feels like a man beside himself, clean out of his
senses (παραφρονῶν)--so unsuitable is the subject for boasting--as he
answers, "I more." Many interpret this as if it meant, "I am more than
a servant of Christ," and then ask wonderingly, "What more?" but
surely the natural meaning is, "I am a servant too, in a higher
degree." The proof of this is given in that tale of sufferings which
bursts irrepressibly from the Apostle's heart, and sweeps us in its
course like a torrent. If he thought of his rivals when he began, and
was instituting a serious comparison when he wrote "in labours _more
abundantly_ [than they]," they must soon have escaped from his mind.
It is his own life as a minister of Christ on which he dwells; and
after the first words, if a comparison is to be made, he leaves the
making of it to others. But comparison, in fact, was out of the
question: the sufferings of the Apostle in doing service to Christ
were unparalleled and alone. The few lines which he devotes to them
are the most vivid light we have on the apostolic age and the
apostolic career. They show how fragmentary, or at all events how
select, is the narrative in the Book of Acts. Thus of the incidents
mentioned in ver. 25 we learn but little from St. Luke. Of the five
times nine-and-thirty stripes, he mentions none; of the three beatings
with rods, only one; of the three shipwrecks, none (for Acts xxvii. is
later), and nothing of the twenty-four hours in the deep. It is not
necessary to comment on details, but one cannot resist the impression
of triumph with which Paul recounts the "perils" he had faced; so many
they were, so various, and so terrible, yet in the Lord's service he
has come safely through them all. It is a commentary from his own hand
on his own word--"as dying, and, behold, we live!" In the retrospect
all these perils show, not only that he is a true servant of Christ,
entering into the fellowship of his Master's sufferings to bring
blessing to men, but that he is owned by Christ as such: the Lord has
delivered him from deaths so great; yes, and will deliver him; and his
hope is set on Him for every deliverance he may need (chap. i. 10).
But, after all, these perils are but outward, and the very
enumeration of them shows that they are things of the past. In all
their kinds and degrees--violence, privation, exposure, fear--they are
a historical testimony to the devotion with which Paul has served
Christ. He bore in his body the marks which they had left, and to him
they were the marks of Jesus; they identified him as Christ's slave.
But not to mention incidental matters,[98] there is another testimony
to his ministry which is ever with him--a burden as crushing as these
bodily sufferings, and far more constant in its pressure: "that which
cometh upon me daily, anxiety for all the Churches." Short of this,
anything of which man can boast may be, at least in a qualified sense,
"after the flesh"; but in this identification of himself with Christ's
cause in the world--this bearing of others' burdens on his
spirit--there is that fulfilment of Christ's law which alone and
finally legitimates a Christian ministry. Nor was it merely in an
official sense that Paul was interested in the affairs of the Church.
When the Church is once planted in the world, it has a side which is
of the world, a side which may be administered without a very heavy
expenditure of Christian feeling: this, it is safe to say, is simply
out of sight. Paul's anxiety for the Churches is defined in all its
scope and intensity in the passionate words of the twenty-ninth verse:
"Who is weak, and I am not weak? Who is made to stumble, and I burn
not?" His love individualised Christian people, and made him one with
them. There was no trembling timorous soul, no scrupulous conscience,
in all the communities he had founded, whose timidity and weakness did
not put a limit to his strength: he condescended to their
intelligence, feeding them with milk, and not with meat; he measured
his liberty, not in principle but in practice, by their bondage; his
heart thrilled with their fears; in the fulness of his Christ-like
strength he lived a hundred feeble lives. And when spiritual harm came
to one of them--when the very least was made to stumble, and was
caught in the snare of falsehood or sin--the pain in his heart was
like burning fire. The sorrow that pierced the soul of Christ pierced
his soul also; the indignation that glowed in the Master's breast, as
He pronounced woe on the man by whom occasions of stumbling come,
glowed again in him. This is the fire that Christ came to cast on the
earth, and that He longed to see kindled--this prompt intense sympathy
with all that is of God in men's souls, this readiness to be weak with
the weak, this pain and indignation when the selfishness or pride of
men leads the weak astray, and imperils the work for which Christ
died. And this is indeed the Apostle's last line of defence. Nowhere
could boasting be less in place than when a man speaks of the lessons
he has learned at the Cross: yet these only give him a title to glory
as "a minister of Christ." If glorying _here_ is inadmissible, it is
because glorying in every sense is "folly."
FOOTNOTES:
[93] This (observe the aorist λαβών) implies that he brought some
money with him from Macedonia to Corinth.
[94] That is, the two ἵνα are co-ordinate.
[95] That is, the ἵνα are not co-ordinate, but the second is
subordinate to τῶν θελόντων ἀφορμήν.
[96] There has been some discussion as to the precise force of
δικαιοσύνη ("righteousness") in this place. It seems to me most
natural to take it, without suspicion, in a perfectly simple sense: a
minister of righteousness is the truly good character which these bad
men affect. To suppose a covert sneer at their "legalism," or that
they had pointed to such matters as are discussed in 1 Cor. v., viii.,
and x., as indicating the need of a gospel which would pay more
attention to righteousness than Paul's, is surely too clever.
[97] This is the force of the ὡς: it leaves it open whether the idea
has reality answering to it or not.
[98] This, which is the second alternative given in the margin of the
Revised Version, seems to me the true meaning of χωρὶς τῶν παρεκτός.
XXVI
_STRENGTH AND WEAKNESS_
"If I must needs glory, I will glory of the things that concern my
weakness. The God and Father of the Lord Jesus, He who is blessed
for evermore, knoweth that I lie not. In Damascus the governor under
Aretas the king guarded the city of the Damascenes, in order to take
me: and through a window was I let down in a basket by the wall, and
escaped his hands.
"I must needs glory, though it is not expedient; but I will come to
visions and revelations of the Lord. I know a man in Christ,
fourteen years ago (whether in the body, I know not; or whether out
of the body, I know not; God knoweth), such a one caught up even to
the third heaven. And I know such a man (whether in the body, or
apart from the body, I know not; God knoweth), how that he was
caught up into Paradise, and heard unspeakable words, which it is
not lawful for a man to utter. On behalf of such a one will I glory:
but on mine own behalf I will not glory, save in _my_ weaknesses.
For if I should desire to glory, I shall not be foolish; for I shall
speak the truth: but I forbear, lest any man should account of me
above that which he seeth me _to be_, or heareth from me. And by
reason of the exceeding greatness of the revelations--wherefore,
that I should not be exalted overmuch, there was given to me a thorn
in the flesh, a messenger of Satan to buffet me, that I should not
be exalted overmuch. Concerning this thing I besought the Lord
thrice, that it might depart from me. And He hath said unto me, My
grace is sufficient for thee: for _My_ power is made perfect in
weakness. Most gladly therefore will I rather glory in my
weaknesses, that the strength of Christ may rest upon me. Wherefore
I take pleasure in weaknesses, in injuries, in necessities, in
persecutions, in distresses, for Christ's sake: for when I am weak,
then am I strong."--2 COR. xi. 30-xii. 10 (R.V.).
The difficulties of exposition in this passage are partly connected
with its form, partly with its substance: it will be convenient to
dispose of the formal side first. The thirtieth verse of the eleventh
chapter--"If I must needs glory, I will glory of the things that
concern my weakness"--seems to serve two purposes. On the one hand, it
is a natural and effective climax to all that precedes; it defines the
principle on which Paul has acted in the glorying of vv. 23-29. It is
not of exploits that he is proud, but of perils and sufferings; not of
what he has achieved, but of what he has endured, for Christ's sake;
in a word, not of strength, but of weakness. On the other hand, this
same thirtieth verse indubitably points forward; it defines the
principle on which Paul will always act where boasting is in view; and
it is expressly resumed in chap. xii., ver. 5 and ver. 9. For this
reason, it seems better to treat it as a text than as a peroration; it
is the key to the interpretation of what follows, put into our hands
by the Apostle himself. In the full consciousness of its dangers and
inconveniences, he means to go a little further in this foolish
boasting; but he takes security, as far as possible, against its moral
perils, by choosing as the ground of boasting things which in the
common judgment of men would only bring him shame.
At this point we are startled by a sudden appeal to God, the solemnity
and fulness of which strike us, on a first reading, as almost
painfully gratuitous. "The God and Father of the Lord Jesus, He who is
blessed for ever, knoweth that I lie not." What is the explanation of
this extraordinary earnestness? There is a similar passage in Gal. i.
19--"Now touching the things which I write unto you, behold, before
God, I lie not"--where Lightfoot says the strength of the Apostle's
language is to be explained by the unscrupulous calumnies cast upon
him by his enemies. This _may_ be the clue to his vehemence here; and
in point of fact it falls in with by far the most ingenious
explanation that has been given of the two subjects introduced in this
paragraph. The explanation I refer to is that of Heinrici. He supposes
that Paul's escape from Damascus, and his visions and revelations, had
been turned to account against him by his rivals. They had used the
escape to accuse him of ignominious cowardice: the indignity of it is
obvious enough. His visions and revelations were as capable of
misconstruction: it was easy to call them mere illusions, signs of a
disordered brain; it was not too much for malice to hint that his call
to apostleship rested on nothing better than one of these ecstatic
hallucinations. It is because things so dear to him are attacked--his
reputation for personal courage, which is the mainstay of all the
virtues; his actual vision of Christ, and divinely authorised
mission--that he makes the vehement appeal that startles us at first.
He calls God to witness that in regard to both these subjects he is
going to tell the exact truth: the truth will be his sufficient
defence. Ingenious as it is, I do not think this theory can be
maintained. There is no hint in the passage that Paul is defending
himself; he is glorying, and glorying in the things that concern his
weakness. It seems more probable that, when he dictated the strong
words of ver. 31, the outline of all he was going to say was in his
mind; and as the main part of it--all about the visions and
revelations--was absolutely uncontrollable by any witness but his own,
he felt moved to attest it thus in advance. The names and attributes
of God fall in well with this. As the visions and revelations were
specially connected with Christ, and were counted by the Apostle among
the things for which he had the deepest reason to praise God, it is
but the reflection of this state of mind when he appeals to "the God
and _Father of the Lord Jesus_, He who is _blessed for evermore_."
This is not a random adjuration, but an appeal which takes shape
involuntarily in a grateful and pious heart, on which the memory of a
signal grace and honour still rests. Of course the verses about
Damascus stand rather out of relation to it. But it is a violence
which nothing can justify to strike them out of the text on this
ground, and along with them part or the whole of ver. 1 in chap.
xii.[99] For many reasons unknown to us the danger in Damascus, and
the escape from it, may have had a peculiar interest for the Apostle;
_hæc persequutio_, says Calvin, _erat quasi primum tirocinium Pauli_;
it was his "matriculation in the school of persecution." He may have
intended, as Meyer thinks, to make it the beginning of a new catalogue
of sufferings for Christ's sake, all of which were to be covered by
the appeal to God, and have abruptly repented, and gone off on another
subject; but whether or not, to expunge the lines is pure wilfulness.
The Apostle glories in what he endured at Damascus--in the imminent
peril and in the undignified escape alike--as in things belonging to
his weakness. Another might choose to hide such things, but they are
precisely what he tells. In Christ's service scorn is glory, ignominy
is honour; and it is the mark of loyalty when men rejoice that they
are counted worthy to suffer shame for the Name.[100]
When we go on to chap. xii., and the second of the two subjects with
which boasting is to be associated, we meet in the first verse with
serious textual difficulties. Our Authorised Version gives the
rendering: "_It is not expedient for me doubtless to glory. I will come
to visions and revelations of the Lord._" This follows the Textus
Receptus: Καυχᾶσθαι δὴ οὐ συμφέρει μοι· ἐλεύσομαι γὰρ κ.τ.λ., only
omitting the γὰρ (_for_ I will come). The MSS. are almost chaotic, but
the most authoritative editors--Tregelles, Tischendorf in his last
edition, and Westcott and Hort--agree in reading Καυχᾶσθαι δεῖ οὐ[101
συμφέρον μὲν ἐλεύσομαι δὲ κ.τ.λ.] This is the text which our Revisers
render: "_I must needs glory, though it is not expedient; but I will
come to visions and revelations of the Lord_." Practically, the
difference is not so great after all. According to the best authorities,
Paul repeats that he is being forced to speak as he does; the
consciousness of the disadvantages attendant on this course does not
leave him, it is rather deepened, as he approaches the highest and most
sacred of all subjects--visions and revelations he has received from
Christ. Of these two words, revelations is the wider in import: visions
were only one of the ways in which revelations could be made. Paul, of
course, is not going to boast directly of the visions and revelations
themselves. All through the experiences to which he alludes under this
name he was to himself as a third person; he was purely passive; and to
claim credit, to glory as if he had done or originated anything, would
be transparently absurd. But there are "things of his weakness"
associated with, if not dependent on, these high experiences; and it is
in them, after due explanation, that he purposes to exult.
He begins abruptly. "I know a man in Christ, fourteen years ago
(whether in the body, I know not; or whether out of the body, I know
not; God knoweth), such a one caught up even to the third heaven." A
man in Christ means a Christian man, a man in his character _as_ a
Christian. To St. Paul's consciousness the wonderful experience he is
about to describe was not natural, still less pathological, but
unequivocally religious. It did not befall him as a man simply, still
less as an epileptic patient; it was an unmistakably Christian
experience. He only existed for himself, during it, as "a man in
Christ." "I know such a man," he says, "fourteen years ago caught up
even to the third heaven." The date of this "rapture" (the same word
is used in Acts viii. 39; 1 Thess. iv. 17; Rev. xii. 5: all
significant examples) would be about A.D. 44. This forbids us to
connect it in any way with Paul's conversion, which must have been
twenty years earlier than this letter; and indeed there is no reason
for identifying it with anything else we know of the Apostle. At the
date in question, as far as can be made out from the Book of Acts, he
must have been in Tarsus or in Antioch. The rapture itself is
described as perfectly incomprehensible. He may have been carried up
bodily to the heavenly places; his spirit may have been carried up,
while his body remained unconscious upon earth: he can express no
opinion about this; the truth is only known to God. It is idle to
exploit a passage like this in the interest of apostolic psychology;
Paul is only taking elaborate pains to tell us that of the mode of his
rapture he was absolutely ignorant. It is fairer to infer that the
event was unique in his experience, and that when it happened he was
alone; had such things recurred, or had there been spectators, he
could not have been in doubt as to whether he was caught up "in the
body" or "out of the body." The mere fact that the date is given
individualises the event in his life; and it is going beyond the facts
altogether to generalise it, and take it as the type of such an
experience as accompanied his conversion, or of the visions in Acts
xvi. 9, xxii. 17 f., xviii. 9. It was one, solitary, incomparable
experience, including in it a complex of visions and revelations
granted by Christ: it was this, at all events, to the Apostle; and if
we do not believe what he tells us about it, we can have no knowledge
of it at all.
"Caught up even to the third heaven." The Jews usually counted seven
heavens; sometimes, perhaps because of the dual form of the Hebrew word
for heaven, two; but the distinctions between the various heavens were
as fanciful as the numbers were arbitrary. It adds nothing, even to the
imagination, to speak of an aerial, a sidereal, and a spiritual heaven,
and to suppose that these are meant by Paul; we can only think vaguely
of the "man in Christ" rising through one celestial region after another
till he came even to the third. The word chosen to define the distance
(ἕως) suggests that an impression of vast spaces traversed remained on
the Apostle's mind; and that the third heaven, on which his sentence
pauses, and which is a resting-place for his memory, was also a station,
so to speak, in his rapture. This is the only supposition which does
justice to the resumption in ver. 3 of the deliberate and circumstantial
language of ver. 2. "And I know such a man--whether in the body or apart
from the body (I know not) God knoweth--how that he was caught up into
Paradise, and heard unspeakable words that it is not lawful for a man to
utter." This is a resumption, not a repetition. Paul is not elaborately
telling the same story over again, but he is carrying it on, with the
same full circumstance, the same grave asseveration, from the point at
which he halted. The rapture had a second stage, under the same
incomprehensible conditions, and in it the Christian man passed out and
up from the third heaven into Paradise. Many of the Jews believed in a
Paradise beneath the earth, the abode of the souls of the good while
they awaited their perfecting at the Resurrection (cf. Luke xvi. 23 ff.,
xxiii. 43); but obviously this cannot be the idea here. We must think
rather of what the Apocalypse calls "the Paradise of God" (ii. 7), where
the tree of life grows, and where those who overcome have their reward.
It is an abode of unimaginable blessedness, "far above all heavens," to
use the Apostle's own words elsewhere (Eph. iv. 10). What visions he
had, or what revelations, during that pause in the third heaven, Paul
does not say; and at this supreme point of his rapture, in Paradise, the
words he heard were words unspeakable, which it is not lawful for man to
utter. Mortal ears might hear, but mortal lips might not repeat, sounds
so mysterious and divine: it was not for _man_ (ἀνθρώπῳ is qualitative)
to utter them.
But why, we may ask, if this rapture has its meaning and value solely
for the Apostle, should he refer to it here at all? Why should he make
such solemn statements about an experience, the historical conditions
of which, as he is careful to assure us, are incomprehensible, while
its spiritual content is a secret? Is not such an experience literally
_nothing_ to us? No, unless Paul himself is nothing; for this
experience was evidently a great thing to him. It was the most sacred
privilege and honour he had ever known; it was among his strongest
sources of inspiration; it had a powerful tendency to generate
spiritual pride; and it had its accompaniment, and its counter-weight,
in his sharpest trial. The world knows little of its greatest men;
perhaps we very rarely know what are the great things in the lives
even of the people who are round about us. Paul had kept silence about
this sublime experience for fourteen years, and no man had ever
guessed it; it had been a secret between the Lord and His disciple;
and they only, who were in the secret, could rightly interpret all
that depended upon it. There is a kind of profanity in forcing the
heart to show itself too far, in compelling a man to speak about, even
though he does not divulge, the things that it is not lawful to utter.
The Corinthians had put this profane compulsion on the Apostle; but
though he yields to it, it is in a way which keeps clear of the
profanity. He tells what he dare tell in the third person, and then
goes on: "On behalf of such a one will I glory, but on behalf of
myself will I not glory, save in my infirmities." _Removere debemus_
τὸ _ego a rebus magnis_ (Bengel): there are things too great to allow
the intrusion of self. Paul does not choose to identify the poor
Apostle whom the Corinthians and their misleading teachers used so
badly with the man in Christ who had such inconceivable honour put on
him by the Lord; if he does boast on behalf of such a one, and magnify
his sublime experiences, at all events he does not transfer his
prerogatives to _himself_; he does not say, "_I_ am that incomparably
honoured man; reverence in me a special favourite of Christ." On the
contrary, where _his own_ interest has to be forwarded, he will glory
in nothing but his weaknesses. The one thing about which he is anxious
is that men should not think too highly of him, nor go in their
appreciation beyond what their experience of him as a man and a
teacher justifies (ver. 6). He might, indeed, boast, reasonably
enough; for the truth would suffice, without any foolish exaggeration;
but he forbears, for the reason just stated. We are familiar with the
danger of thinking too highly of ourselves; it is as real a danger,
though probably a less considered one, to be too highly thought of by
others. Paul dreaded it; so does every wise man. To be highly thought
of, where the character is sincere and unpretentious, may be a
protection, and even an inspiration; but to have a reputation,
morally, that one does not deserve--to be counted good in respects in
which one is really bad--is to have a frightful difficulty added to
penitence and amendment. It puts one in a radically false position; it
generates and fosters hypocrisy; it explains a vast mass of spiritual
ineffectiveness. The man who is insincere enough to be puffed up by it
is not far from judgment.
But to return to the text. Paul wishes to be humble; he is content
that men should take him as they find him, infirmities and all. He has
that about him, too, and not unconnected with these high experiences,
the very purpose of which is to keep him humble. If the text is
correct,[102] he expresses himself with some embarrassment. "And by
reason of the exceeding greatness of the revelations--wherefore, that
I should not be exalted overmuch, there was given to me a thorn in
the flesh, a messenger of Satan to buffet me, that I should not be
exalted overmuch." The repetition of the last word shows where the
emphasis lies: Paul has a deep and constant sense of the danger of
spiritual pride, and he knows that he would fall into it unless a
strong counter-pressure were kept up upon him.